That is when the next new post will appear here. For the next 7 days Donna and I will be chasing Cheryl Crow and her boyfriend around the 4th state to ratify the US Constitution.
Looking southwest at the corner of Mr. Fletcher’s Ride and an unnamed path about 1/2 mile in from our usual entry point into Hitchcock Woods. Three weeks since our last visit and spring has sprung inside the woods. We stumbled on a couple of clusters of wild azaleas that were blooming while we walked and the dogwoods were still mostly in bloom (if you look down the trail to the right you can see one.)
On today’s trip to the airport to retrieve Donna’s aunt I stopped into the book/magazine store and browsed around. I checked out all the car magazines, but I had seen most of them and the others I will see thanks to friendly co-workers. But there on the bottom shelf was was one called MPH, I hadn’t ever seen it before. Intrigued, I picked it up, that there was a photo of the new Miata didn’t hurt. I read the table of contents and bought it. On page 36 is an article called GPS Explained and they had this tag line to entice you to read it: How does it know where you are when you have no clue? They seem to be shooting for all irreverent humor, all the time. Maybe you kids love that, but I find a little goes along way. Not that I’m offended by some of the non-PC humor, I like it, but I think it might wear thin over time. When Maxim magazine first came out I subscribed and looked forward to every issue for the first nine months, then not so much. I let my subscription lapse.
Speaking of subscriptions, my copy of the magazine had 6 blow-ins begging you to subscribe to MPH. 10 issues, each only $10.00* Right below that they tell you it is $9.97* for a 10 issue year. So they rounded a little. There’s that asterisk again. If you look to the bottom of the card and the other asterisk you find that it says *Plus $2 shipping and handling. That’s sneaky. I think that is the first time I’ve seen them add a S&H charge to a magazine subscription (at least for US residents for US magazines.)
Check out a sample of their style at www.mphmagazineonline.com, might be right up your alley.
Washed the car this afternoon. It wasn’t real dirty, but it was covered with water spots from the rain of Thursday, mixing with the last of the pine pollen. I parked under the awning to keep the oak pollen clusters that are dropping off the big tree near the driveway from falling all over the car as I cleaned it. I had just finished drying it off when Donna came back from the store and announced the MSV needed gas, so I needed to take it out and fill it up. While I was out I should take her downtown for ice cream for good measure.
I left the Miata where it was and took a little trip. When we returned about 30 minutes later, I moved the Miata into the garage, so the Civic could get it’s awning back, I noticed there was a fine layer of pine pollen already collected on the hood. I thought that stuff was through falling…
I’m in my second season of listening to the Red Sox baseball game on the Internet. Something changed this year, the WEEI broadcast I get from MLB.com has got annoying sound gaps. Spots of silence between the calls from the announcers. When they are speaking, you hear them and the murmur of the crowd in the background, when they stop, nothing. It is very disconcerting. I wrote to the radio station via their contacts page:
As a transplanted New Englander and lifelong Red Sox fan imagine how overjoyed I was to realize I could listen to the Sox on the radio via the Internet. I listened to practically every game last year once I discovered Gameday Audio at MLB.com.
I signed up again this year too. But what the heck is wrong with your broadcast on MLB.com this year. It sounds like it is breaking up. The abrupt silences are annoying. Did you go to voice activated mikes or something? It is not my connection (I have cable Internet) as I can listen to any other game and their broadcasts are fine. I have taken to listening to the Red Sox games using the visiting clubs radio stations.
Try and imagine the pain, as tonight I an listening to WCBS…
Their response came quickly:
You’ll have to deal with MLB on that. We provide them with a clean feed. What they do with it, to be honest, we have no idea.
I think there is an email address on their website to contact them with regards to problems like this.
I appreciate your interest and am sorry you haven’t gotten the quality you’re looking for.
So to play the game, I wrote to MLB.com via their contact page. I quoted both the above emails and added more descriptions of my attempts to test and solve this on my own. When I hit submit, the screen flashed and I was right back on the contacts page with all the entry boxes blank. I wonder if they got my missive? I didn’t get directed to a conformation page…I’ll keep you posted.
Regular readers will remember Sally, Donna’s friend that we visited in DC recently. She was heading for Kosovo, but that fell thru, so she was given a choice of several other garden spots around the globe, well she chose Windhoek, Namibia. She now has less than a week before she heads of to the other side of the world. Wanting to keep in touch, but also wanting to avoid HUGE phone bills, the friends at the State Department recommended she try Skype a free Internet telephony service. We downloaded the 6.4 Meg application and it installed with ease. The only stumbling block was I had to dig out the free microphone that came with the PC, tear it out of it’s plastic bag and plug it in.
Our first test call failed when she couldn’t figure out where the microphone was and how to enable it on her laptop. Call two went thru without a hitch as her daughter was there and was techno-savvy enough to get Sally going right. Talked for about 20 minutes and had only a couple of negatives. We had some echoes happening when she did not use her headset, but with the headset it was fine. Must be the location of the built-in speakers in relation to her built-in mike. Then we seemed to lose the connection for about 15-20 seconds towards the end.
All in all a very positive experience considering the cost. I can’t even imagine what AT&T would charge for a 20 minute call to, literally, half way around the planet.
Took me about 20 minutes to get the set up of the MTrebuild “plugin” right and get the cron job figured out, so now if you want to see what song is playing* and the three previous songs played on Radio Paradise just take a look over to the right column under Mr. Sturgeon’s Law.
